That night she began receiving Facebook messages at her Virginia home from friends saying something horrible had happened to her mother, Kim Hua Flournoy, 65, while she was playing bingo in Jacksonville.

Flournoy-DiJoseph spent the following two hours trying to get answers about her mother from hospitals and law enforcement agencies in and around Onslow County. She got nowhere, but did find a news website stating a woman had been killed outside a Jacksonville bingo hall.

Two time zones away, Sam Flournoy, 40, a park ranger in Colorado, received notification from fellow law enforcement officers that his mother had been shot and killed.

Flournoy-DiJoseph would later get official confirmation on her mother’s death from Cynthia Figueroa, the victim’s advocate with the Jacksonville Department of Public Safety.

“It was a rough couple of hours,” Flournoy-DiJoseph said.

She said she was “confused and floored” by the news her mother was dead.

“This is one of the most heinous crimes I’ve ever seen,” Public Safety Director Mike Yaniero told The Daily News on Friday. Yaniero has been the chief police officer in Jacksonville for eight years, previously serving as a deputy police chief in Bristol, Tenn.

The elderly Flournoy was killed by a gunshot to the face, according to her death certificate.

Her body was found moments after the shooting in the rear parking lot of TNT Beach Bingo, located at 205 Henderson Drive, less than eight miles from her Montclair subdivision home.

Flournoy was pronounced dead at the scene. Her assailant is still at large.

“She was a tough lady,” Sam Flournoy said of his mother while sharing details of her mother’s life with The Daily News on Thursday inside a conference room of a Marine Boulevard hotel. A contingent of close friends from around the country congregated in the lobby.

Composed but visibly tired from finalizing memorial service plans and fielding phone calls from concerned friends, Kim Flournoy-DiJoseph joined in the reflection of her mother’s life.

Born in Malaysia in 1947, their mother met their father, Samuel Flournoy, in the late 1960s while he was a Marine embassy guard stationed in Singapore. The two married in 1970. Two years later he was assigned to Camp Lejeune, and the two children soon followed.

Through various deployments and reassignments, Jacksonville’s pull seemed strongest; and the Flournoys purchased a one-story brick home Victoria Road in the mid-1970s.

The elder Sam Flournoy, having reached the rank of chief warrant officer, died of a brain aneurism in 1979. To provide for her two young children, Kim Flournoy went to work at a cafeteria aboard base. She retired from the job as the manager in the late 1990s.

Both her children graduated from White Oak High School.

As a widowed mother juggling a career and maintaining a household, Kim Flournoy developed a love for bingo. Her children said she played the game as long as they can remember.

Sam said his upbringing by a single mom was typical.

“There was the good and there was the bad,” he said.

After he finished college, things changed for the good.

“Now our relationship had moved more to like friends,” he said. He recalled an incident where he took his mother to the movies but before entering the theater his mother went to a local grocery store and purchased several items she hurriedly stuffed into her purse.

“So mom sneaks this stuff into the theater — I forget what was showing — and takes out a gallon of ice cream and a bottle of root beer and begins making root beer floats during the movie,” he said, smiling for the first time during the interview.

Flournoy-DiJoseph said she had many fond memories of their mother, but one rises above all others: A little more that two years ago, her son Sunny met his grandmother for the first time.

“The way she looked at him and he at her was as if they already knew each other,” she said. “It made her as bright as I have ever seen her before.

Both adult children said they believe police are doing everything they can to bring the killer to justice.

“I’ve been told things are happening; and having been in the field for 10 years, I feel they have all available resources working,” Sam Flournoy said. “I have a firm trust in them.”

Their mother was the type of person who makes up the fabric of Jacksonville, they said.

Both siblings struggled to come up with a statement to the person who pulled the trigger.

“I know this person is in pain too. I believe that,” Kim said, staring straight ahead and holding back tears. “They need to reflect on what they did to a 65-year-old woman and to a community.

“They hurt people, they hurt a community.”

Contact Daily News Senior Reporter Lindell Kay at 910-219-8455 or lindell.kay@jdnews.com. Follow him on Twitter and friend him on Facebook @ 1lindell.